I’ve not been doing a lot of traveling because Stephen and I have been working like crazy so we could retire early, giving us more time to travel. Yay! Happily, I can report that we retired in March 2014, and after spending some time with our families, we will soon be doing some more traveling and hopefully you’ll see me posting here more regularly.

The other bit of news is that I’ve started a blog on frugality and simple living, La Vida Frugal. You can read our early retirement story there, as well as lots of tips for living frugally and simply.

We’ve just released our first book of travel photography, Prague: A Photographic Guide. The book is available only on the iBookstore or in iTunes, for viewing on an iPad. If you download it, please take a moment to rate it, even if you don’t have time to write a review.

You can also browse an extensive gallery of Prague photos on the Bay Images website. Here’s a synopsis of the book: A stroll through Prague can make you feel like you’ve stepped back in time and when you walk down its narrow cobblestone streets, you see centuries of history, architecture, and culture. Prague: A Photographic Guide recreates the city experience with a stunning photographic tour of the best known historical and cultural sites. With more than 100 high resolution, retina display-ready photographs, readers can tour Old Town Square and see the Astronomical clock, walk through the solemn Old Jewish Cemetery, and enter the majestic Saint Vitus Cathedral.

Travelers can use this book to help plan a trip or bring back memories of a visit to the city. Photographers can gain inspiration from the beautiful pictures and use the book to stimulate ideas for their own photographs. The book also covers nearby Kutna Hora and Sedlec, which are just a short day trip from the city. Note that this book does not cover hotels, dining, or lodging as there are plenty of other excellent references dedicated to this information.

Today, we were pretty slow to get ourselves going. We were meeting one of my cousins for lunch at noon, so we didn’t need to rush. We had a leisurely breakfast, then did a little research on finding a place to stay. Since we were headed to the coast, we found that all the places […]

Today’s “continental” breakfast was considerably better than the previous day’s fare. It was self-serve, but they had eggs, smokies, toast, doughnuts, English muffins, cereal, and even a make your own waffles station. It was excellent. We left the hotel at 7:00 to drive to the Columbia River Gorge area. To see the falls during the […]

Of any of the motels we’ve stayed in so far on this trip, the Econolodge Convention Center was probably the most disappointing. It wasn’t horrible, but the area wasn’t the safest, the toilet didn’t work properly, the bed was hard, there were no extra pillows, and the continental breakfast was extremely fattening pre-packaged pastries. It […]

We were in no hurry to get on the road. It was nice to just hang around and chat with my cousin and his family this morning. Finally, we reluctantly decided we better head out. We decided to stop in Salem. We went to the Bush House and Deepwood Estate, both historical dwellings. We didn’t […]

After a quick continental breakfast this morning, we got on the road again. We took the 242 to do the Proxy Falls hike. The hike was pretty easy, except for the little bit down to the bottom of the lower falls, which was steep and required crawling under a fallen log. The falls, though, were […]

The hotel had a continental breakfast this morning, which was nice. They had muffins, fruit, cereal, juice and coffee. When I was picking the hotel for last night, this one had a whole bunch of reviews. All of them were pretty good, except for the most recent one. That guy gave it one star and […]

We slept in a bit this morning, since we had such a long day yesterday. I woke up around 7:00 am and had time to post the past couple days’ worth of travelogues. At about 8:30 am, we headed out toward the Elkhorn Scenic Drive in Baxter and Grant Counties. Our first stop, and probably […]

This morning we got up at 4:50 am and headed straight back up to Crater Lake for the sunrise. This time Stephen found a more appropriate spot and I think he got some good pictures. I sat in the car and worked on a review of blogging on the iPad with WordPress, and downloaded my […]